---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Haskell Weekly News
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN
Issue 40 - August 14, 2006
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to issue 40 of HWN, a weekly newsletter covering developments
in the Haskell community. Each week, new editions are posted to [1]the
Haskell mailing list as well as to [2]the Haskell Sequence and
[3]Planet Haskell. [4]RSS is also available, and headlines appear on
[5]haskell.org.
A mega super bumper issue, for the 1st birthday of the Haskell Weekly News
1. http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
2. http://sequence.complete.org/
3. http://planet.haskell.org/
4. http://sequence.complete.org/node/feed
5. http://haskell.org/
Announcements
* The Haskell Workshop . Andres Loeh [6]announced the preliminary
schedule of the Haskell Workshop 2006, part of the 2006
International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP)
6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14104
* dbus haskell bindings . Evan Martin [7]announced preliminary D-Bus
Haskell bindings. D-Bus is a message bus system, a simple way for
applications to talk to one another. [8]More
7. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/13771
8. http://neugierig.org/software/hdbus/
* The GHC typechecker is Turing-complete . Robert Dockins was able
to [9]show how that the GHC typechecker with multi-parameter
typeclasses, functional dependencies, and undecidable instances is
Turing-complete.
9. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14088
* Haskell Program Coverage . Colin Runciman [10]announced the first
release of hpc, a new tool for Haskell developers. Hpc records and
displays Haskell program coverage. It provides coverage
information of two kinds: source coverage and boolean-control
coverage. [11]More here
10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14087
11. http://www.galois.com/~andy/hpc-intro.html
* Smash your boiler-plate without class and Typeable . Oleg Kiselyov
[12]described a new generic programming technique, expressive
enough to traverse a term and return another term of a different
type, determined by the original term's type/structure. [13]More
details
12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14086
13. http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/syb4.hs
* Paper: Software Extension and Integration with Type Classes . Ralf
Laemmel and Klaus Ostermann [14]invite comments towards the final
version of their paper [15]Software Extension and Integration with
Type Classes
14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14040
15. http://homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/gpce06/
* HSP.Clientside 0.01 . Joel Björnson [16]announced a release of his
Summer of Code project HSP.Clientside 0.01. Present features
include an embedding of (typed) JavaScript language in Haskell, a
small combinator library for generating JavaScript code, and
high-level interface to Ajax functionality.
16. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14023
* Monadic probabilistic functional programing . Stefan Karrmann
[17]announced that he had extended Martin Erwig's PFP library to
support abstract monads, cabal and darcs
17. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14012
* hdbc-odbc 1.0.0.1 . John Goerzen [18]released DBC-odbc, the ODBC
backend driver for HDBC, version 1.0.0.1.
18. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13998
* Few Digits 0.5.0 . Russell O'Connor This year, Few Digits competed
in the [19]More Digits contest. To celebrate, version 0.5.0 of Few
Digits is available. Few Digits 0.5.0 is now ten times faster and
three times more complicated. Few Digits has been Cabalized for
your convenience. [20]More info
19. http://rnc7.loria.fr/competition.html
20. http://r6.ca/FewDigits/
* System.FilePath 0.9 . Neil Mitchell [21]announced System.FilePath
0.9
21. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13985
* The History of Haskell . Phil Wadler, John Hughes, Paul Hudak and
Simon Peyton Jones [22]have been writing a paper, The History of
Haskell, for the History Of Programming Languages conference
(HOPL'07), and they invite feedback. Wiki page [23]here.
22. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13983
23. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/History_of_Haskell
* AngloHaskell . Lemmih [24]mentioned that AngloHaskell will be held
at Cambridge in August. The agenda includes beer, unicycles,
hacking and other fun. [25]More info
24. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13979
25. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/AngloHaskell
* Haskell XML Toolbox Version 6.0, 6.1 . Uwe Schmidt [26]announced
[27]two new versions of the Haskell XML Toolbox. New features
include ghc 6.4.2 support, better XPath integration, separate
documentation for filter API and an arrow API
26. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13924
27. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13949
* Down the rabbit hole . Bulat Ziganshin [28]announced the
availability of a new tutorial directed toward comprehensive
explanation of the IO monad, and it's use in complex programs
28. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13914
* ldap-haskell, arch2darcs and darcs-buildpackage . John Goerzen
[29]posted new versions of these packages
29. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/13912
* Internships on GHC and Haskell at MSR Cambridge . Simon
Peyton-Jones [30]announced that MSR Cambridge is taking interns
year-round, not just in the summer months. GHC HQ are keen to
attract motivated and well-qualified folk to work on improving or
developing GHC. [31]More details
30. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/10219
31. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Internships
* FGL . Martin Erwig [32]announced a new release of his well known
Functional Graph Library (FGL).
32. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4948
* Takusen . Alistair Bayley and Oleg Kiselyov [33]released a new
version of Takusen, a library for accessing DBMSs. The most
significant code change is a new internal design, giving better
separation of concerns like statement preparation, binding, and
result-set processing. Takusen is now held in darcs, and
[34]hosted at haskell.org
33. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4887
34. http://darcs.haskell.org/takusen
* Text.Regex.Lazy 0.44, 0.56, 0.66 and 0.70 . Chris Kuklewicz
[35]announced [36]Text.Regex.Lazy 0.44-0.70, with many
enhancements. Multiple backends are supported, in addition to the
"full lazy" and the DFA backends. Text.Regex.Lazy is a replacement
and enhancement for Text.Regex. More details [37]here
35. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4977
36. http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazy-regex
37. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/5028
* Streams 0.2.1 beta . Bulat Ziganshin [38]released Streams 0.2.1
beta, featuring various bug fixes and improvements to the streams
library
38. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4865/focus=4865
Haskell'
This section covers the [39]Haskell' standardisation process.
* [40]Numeric Class reworking
39. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime
40. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.prime/1568/focus=1568
Discussion
* Package "mounting" . Sven Hallberg [41]proposed drop the
assumption that Haskell modules are closed entities, and rather
always consider them to be seen in the context of a particular
package.
41. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4900/focus=4900
* Cabal and DLLs . Jason Dagit [42]described how he was able to use
Cabal with Visual Haskell to build Dlls in Windows.
42. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.libraries/4952/focus=4952
* Replacing GMP . Peter Tanski [43]sparked a long discussion on the
merits and difficulties of replacing the GMP numerical library
used by GHC and nhc98 with a library using a less restrictive
license. More [44]here, [45]here and [46]here
43. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/10287/focus=10287
44. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/10324/focus=10324
45. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/10393/focus=10393
46. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/10408/focus=10408
* The cost of Integer . Serge Mechveliani [47]asked about the
runtime cost of Integer, triggering an interesting discussion
47. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/10313/focus=10313
* Thread-local variables . Frederik Eaton [48]started a large
discussion on the merits or otherwise of thread-local variables.
48. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14033/focus=14033
* Type level programming made simple . Oleg Kiselyov [49]composed a
useful comparison between Prolog and type level programming in
Haskell
49. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/13785
* IRC channel statistics . Don Stewart [50]created some graphs and
analysis of activity and growth of the [51]#haskell IRC channel
50. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/13789
51. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel
Quotes of the Week
* Dan Piponi : "Writing introductions to monads seems to have
developed into an industry"
* John Meacham : "I liken learning Haskell to tipping over a vending
machine. You can't just push it, you gotta rock it back and forth
a few times building up momentum until bam! suddenly the flash of
insight hits and it all makes sense."
* Andrew Bromage : "What was considered 100 milli-Olegs of type
hackery five years ago is standard operating procedure th ese
days"
* Tim Toady : "Learning Haskell itself is easy -- I've done it
several times already"
* Adam : "Lisp is like Ruby with an ugly syntax, impossible stdlib,
and macros that don't compensate for above shortcomings"
* Lennart A : "Hbc still has some unique features, like views. That
I've never used.."
* Edward K : "I've been playing with type level 2s complement
arithmetic"
* Edwin B : "I think I'd panic if I had to write something that
wasn't a compiler"
* Ozone : "Our C++ guru at work is getting a bit sick of me saying:
Ah, so that's like in Haskell, but not quite as elegant..."
* roconnor : "Life lesson from today: 1 closure is nice, 500 000
closures sucks"
* scsibug : "I could have sworn it was incorrect until it
type-checked"
* stepcut : "I wrote 1 + 1 in php once, and got 11 -- wasn't quite
what I was hoping for"
Contributing to HWN
To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the
[52]contributing information. Send stories to dons at cse.unsw.edu.au
. The darcs repository is available at
darcs get http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/hwn
52. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/HWN